Marisa and Collin hit the road for Dallas, Madrid, Barcelona, Avignon, Paris and back. Bon voyage, bon chance, bon vacance!

House/dog-sitting:

Cinnamon for around the legs of the bee hive to keep the ants out; switches for the well/cistern and holding tank; hummingbird food; mail at the PO; videos back to the library; hot tub controls; irrigation systems; seeds to plant in the raised garden boxes; Luna’s routine for walking, eating, playing; yurt ready to go.

Got to figure out a vantage point nearby for the eclipse on Sunday. Should be excellent observation conditions by then after a front blew through last night/this morning.

Last day in Arvada and, well, the ensuing 12 days at Echo Park is still completely unprocessed (both visually, literally, and, perhaps, figuratively, and/or even psycho-spiritually). Whatever the case, it’s over and gone already. But heading to Glade Park above the Colorado National Monument to house-sit for a couple weeks, so should be able to pull some more quality content in then. After that, though, back on the road again, jumping around Colorado, and thence to Arizona (again). Then the job search begins in earnest. Academia, private sector, non-profit, NGO, or perhaps even public sector. Whatever fits the plan — which is an open one!

An afternoon drive/ramble with Karen and a couple of her friends over to Victor, Colorado, not far from (above!) Cripple Creek to the (AngloGold Ashanti) Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine area. It’s been awhile since I’ve been on-location at a major extractives scene. My god. At one point I counted more than 25 250-ton dump trucks operating within sight. We toured the abandoned mining area first — the “Vindicator Valley” trail — then went to several overlooks to see the current tailings dump area and then the open pit which is over a mile across and about 1000 feet deep. After a break at Kathy’s Kitchen in downtown Victor, we stop by the old Sunnyside Cemetery which sits below the cyanide leach field for the Ashanti mine. Back at the cabin, Ron whipped up a great dinner (even though I am not a huge fan of steak, it was great, though a bit much to make it through!).

1st Stop #6015, 11185 Ralston Road
9.908 gallons
$3.499/gallon
$34.67

Conoco, 3201 Wadsworth Blvd.
8.719 gallons
$3.459/gallon
$30.16

Shell, 7970 Wadsworth Blvd.
8.415 gallons
$3.449/gallon
$29.02

Loves # 007, 108 South 12th Street
4.942 gallons
$3.629/gallon
$17.93

Loaf N Jug, 448 Highway 50 East
7.372 gallons
$3.539/gallon
$26.09

King Soopers #612, 3050 West Northern Avenue
6.821 gallons
$3.529/gallon
$24.07

First Stop #5504, 805 Grand Avenue
2.589 gallons
$3.599/gallon
$9.32

Everyday #5715, 300 East Pagosa
9.045 gallons
$3.599/gallon
$32.55

Kayeenta Chevron, Junction 160 and 163
4.824 gallons
$3.739/gallon
$18.04

Circle K #5922, 5650 North Highway 89
6.376 gallons
$3.349/gallon
$21.35

Safeway, 1031 North Highway 89
10.249 gallons
$3.339/gallon
$34.22

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
11.125 gallons
$3.329/gallon
$37.04

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
10.798 gallons
$3.349/gallon
$36.16

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
9.936 gallons
$3.899/gallon
$38.74

the Wednesday flight to Auckland looks in doubt as of today. volcano Cordon Caulle shot so much stuff up to extreme altitudes (over 15 km) and some of that got caught in the jet stream of the Roaring Forties weather pattern, and now, a week later it’s traveled around the globe and hit southern Australia, Tassie, and eNZed. crossing the Tasman Sea is best done by boat. sheesh. Darwin Station keeps an eye on it all locally for the VAAC.

already entering the drone zone of movement, though, regardless of what goes on with the ash cloud. though would not relish being a passive observer of an ash-compromised turbine engine. Air New Zealand hasn’t canceled any flights versus all the other carriers who have up to Quantas which has canceled all their flights to Tassie and eNZed. what to make of that? the NASA images are at least definitive, and surprisingly not referenced in Australian media anywhere.

need warmth, bad! un-heated houses, single-glazed windows, clouds, rain. this is the other Oz. only ‘Tazzie’ is colder, along with the mountain regions, though they probably get more sunshine. hard to theorize, much less predict the weather here. it’s a black box, mostly, though the clouds and sky are compelling and often quite beautiful. I now watch for the Southern Cross when the stars are out. Orion is gone into the sunset.

and practically no images made this year so far. hard to imagine it’s June already given the coldness of this place. solstice in view.

crossing borders.

fortune cookie:

You will be the guest of a gracious host within the month. Lucky Numbers: 2, 15, 22, 26, 40, 44.

hmmm, means I won’t be at Al’s place, for sure…

surpassed the 100 km mark on the lap club. have consistently been doing 3+ km/day for the last two weeks, with a few days off here and there. averaging 48 km/month, not too shabby. final goal for this pitch is to do 4 km. in an hour. it’s going to be harsh to be up at 2000 m. soon, after all this dense sea-side air.

and another emphatic finally, with the Prescott house being liquidated. after more than four years in a severely depressed market across Arizona, one of the worst-hit states in the US housing market, after numerous realtors, open-houses, renters, showings, repairs, and on and on. a bit strange that the place is no longer in the family. after all the maintenance work that I did on it over the years, back to helping on the original construction in the early 1980′s. getting burned by the imploded market is painful: knowing that other investments with the capital would have expanded significantly rather than contracted over the intervening time. a fire-sale three years ago would have, could have, should have … etc …

it was fortuitous that I happened to be there when the eventual buyers happened by for their first walk-through, and I ended up giving them a hour’s pitch on the energy-efficiency and other features of the place. that sold it. the husband is an electrical engineer, so he appreciated the numerous design elements that my father incorporated (in the otherwise traditional wood-frame construction).

but, happy to close that chapter. period. now for a place here in Oz.

well, made to the top of one list, for a change, and not on a ‘most wanted’ one with profiles from my bad side. averaging 48 km/month, I jumped in front of the next highest person (gal) on the Lap-it-up campaign at the uni Sports Centre. that’s 48 km of swimming for the month. it’s been relatively easy, but it’s a chlorinated pool system, so I develop what my Boulder students labeled the “Einstein Effect” with my poor hair. oh well. I’ll cut it all off again before heading to summer climes anyway.

anything to avoid the prospect of facing the act of writing: it’s a bane right now. and social life, remote and local, is sadly lacking. can’t seem to organize anything of a balance between the two. it’s all or nothing in tracking what the Self determines as important. versus cashing in on material bulwarks. and anyways:

We see then that the deepest problems are often found in the study of what seems obvious, because the “obvious” is frequently merely a notion that summarizes the invariant features of a certain domain of experience which has become habitual and the basis of which has dropped out of consciousness. — David Bohm

Responding to Felipe’s thread on the bricolabs list:

Obviously, I’m not asking how serious lixoeletronico.org people are, because I’m one of them :P I meant the companies who say they are not using gold, coltan, tungsten etc any more.

jump into the Multi-Platform Story-Telling course to join Jan in the first day of audio work. the students seem quite activated as they continue on the projects that they started in video, moving to four-minute audio pieces, then on to some photographic work, and finally I’m supposed to tie it all together on the ABC Pool site. the intent of the course is to aim at social networking concepts, although I find that the Pool site is a rather generic top-down implementation of contemporary social media. it doesn’t look sustainable except by a back-end maintenance infrastructure (funding infusion), and activities imposed by related institutions (universities) (attention infusion). if there’s time, I’ll make some inquiries on stats, although I doubt that those will be publicly available. most organizations don’t understand that substituting grass-roots impulses with centrally planned deployments simply doesn’t work. we’ll see. I feel like the course is 15 years too late.

by happenstance, walking back from lunch with Jan, note that the Islamic prayer space (split into two sides, one for men and one for women), is open for visitors. the LTU Islamic Students group is holding an Islamic Awareness Week: Islam: The Solution. we go in, and I end up staying for a couple hours, first listening to the general discussion, then jumping in to talk with some of the students. hard to gauge the affect of being an Amurikan in such a situation. there is one other Anglo fellow there, and the rest are from all parts of the Islamic world. interesting field of dialogue follows.

Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret in terris oppressa gravi sub religione [...] primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra [...] ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque, unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, [...] quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

(When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of superstition, [...] ’twas a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her, and first to stand forth to meet her [...]. And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole; whence in victory he brings us tidings what can come to be and what cannot [...]. And so superstition in revenge is cast beneath men’s feet and trampled, and victory raises us to heaven.) — Lucretius

finished the rolling-over process from the travelog to this blog. pain in the arse! 2850 entries at this point, now the hard work of adding several thousand images along with much more audio, and other miscellaneous content in the next months. as acquisitions slack off, I can finally catch up.

in the same moment, I realize that personal communications with Others has dropped off precipitiously in the last, say, two years — hmmm, a direct affect of thesis-mongering? or merely life in this instance? unfortunately, few keep up with this blog, otherwise they would have some inkling of what has gone down in the last 24 months or so.

the other thing I realized was that I’ve been making far more images of roadside memorials (Roadside Memorials?) than of live humans. that’s a bit of a shock to the system to consider. when I’ve been encountering quite a number of new people in life. plenty of opportunities. it seems that it’s too intense to drag out the Nikon — it’s too much. either that, or the recent diving into archive has made the further acquisition of images — the continual expansion of the archive — to be a hopelessly perverse exercise. when so much of it has hardly been surfaced to any of the many represented in it. what to be done? there’s only so much time in a rapidly-passing life!

not to mention the greatest down-side of archive is the life-time/life-energy necessary to committed to maintaining it. an archive is all about order, and a carefully constellated archive — one where things may be found! — tends to dis-order the moment that energy ceases to flow into maintenance of that order.

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. — Ayn Rand

the biggest problem with externalized memory is that when memory is disembodied from the Self, we may no longer feel its effects – in recall, in re-living. we may only simulate the feeling of it, or, at most, resonate with the symbolic values represented in its reproduction. individual embodied memory is directly experienced as a changed body state. externalizing memory is a particular and collective phenomena which arises when the pain of actual experience and its associated memory is too much to bear. externalizing is available from the same technologies (tele) which cause the pain to begin with — dislocation and the pain of separation. perhaps technological development may not proceed fully until the relevant memories are externalized to begin with, then the pain of alienation is transferred to a painless place.

this is illustrated through the wide-spread propagation of pictorial documentation and the subsequent sharing of those images. the originary documentation occurs to enhance or prove the fact that the individual was fully living; at the same time of documentation, the very documentary process dislocates the self from being fully in the life flowing around, causing a pain of loss.

it’s like looking at a stranger’s snapshots from their youth. they contain only generic and shared cultural triggers, nothing more (or less). beyond that, there are resonant memories in the viewer, based in the configuration of their own experiences, and while these can be quite strong at times, the difference between lived experiential memory and those resonances is significant.

antipodal equinox over and done with. looking west out the bedroom window, the sun sets straight on in the clear un-industrialized air. fat moonrise also clear: almost the color of the Icelandic moonrise, but not quite so salmon colored. work starts now. no let-up for three months. no quarter. no muss, no fuss.

Finally done with that process, making sure I have contact info for certain friends, and extricating the Self from that rather use-less interface after eliminating all posts, tags, friends, pages, and links. A relief.

pushing back the deep im-pressions of attention-diverting noise is the primary task I undertake in a learning situation: to the degree that the actual subject of inquiry is secondary. it is more the practice of facing the unknown which is the core of learning. attentively facing the unknown. mediating technologies tend to wrap us in a cocoon of dis-awareness of our own senses and from the flows that we are immersed within, making it impossible to focus attentions on the flows to begin with… ach! it’s such a pervasive problem. It becomes a powerful motivation to engage (young) people and to push back these im-pressing forces and watch them begin to breath freely again and then, to watch them begin to wonder what it is that they would like to learn about, then participate with them as they approach the unknown and engage it…

a Garrison Keillor reading reminded me of this wonderful piece:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
– Bill Shakespeare

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
10.814 gallons
$3.799/gallon
$41.08

This space accreting, while the gradual shutting-down of FaceBook proceeds. After the Lightning trip from Yuma through Calexico on northward to the Bay Area and back 48 hours later with my original road-tripping partner, Gary, sheesh: 36 years compresses into careers, children, life-trajectories, and gas prices. That and a running dialogue on the nature of the cosmos and human relation.

Regarding the FaceBook wastage, well, it seems quite right for the moment, no regrets. When only a minuscule fraction of hundreds of ‘friends’ notice the departure. Mostly the ones who do are also ones who find the whole thing tiresome and distinctly artificial. The ones with thousands of friends notice nothing in that sea of being known and wanted, busy as they pump their status (statii?) by the moment. After being an early adopter, and a participant for a time, it does seem to be only an accumulation of attention-sucking life-dross. A prime example of how media can absorb our attention without limit — making consumable, for consumption, the textually and visually reduced detritus of be-ing. And presenting that as a worthy object of a sizable chunk of our social life-time. Of the same dimension as the proliferation of bottom, side, and top overlay graphics on cable teevee screens.

I discover that I have suffered no irretrievable loss as I squeeze down the feeds (media consumables, eh?) to nothing. No you-tube fragments, no important NYT articles, no photos of vacation travel, no banal ego-feeding status updates. I suffer no gaping existential holes in my existence on the planet. Down to 200 friends, slowly deleting all content, connection, and demarcation in the account so it will end as a shriveled husk, a dried dust mote falling from the data cloud.

Arco AM/PM #033642, 1349 South 4th Avenue
8.866 gallons
$3.399/gallon
$30.59

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
8.358 gallons
$3.449/gallon
$28.83

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know every object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” — Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision”

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
10.412 gallons
$2.959/gallon
$30.81

portrait, Bruce Springsteen, McNichols Arena, Denver, 1980

digging deep into the 35mm archive, from 30 years ago now. 18,000 images. back from the time I covered around 150 concerts in two years, as well as being the photo editor for the yearbook, special editor for the newspaper, and doing some advertising photography — at the same time as slogging through one of the toughest engineering schools in the country, argh. hard days … but much fun: our motto was work hard, play hard. doing all that with good friends, what more can one ask?

this archive will surface in some form in this thesis project, possibly, and if not within that framework, it will simply surface as possible. the (life)-time required to do this is significant. and perhaps that time is short.

Emile writes to the point:

I left facebook last week
by EZ

tired of the mirrors, noise and eyes.

tired of prickly, intimate and fleshy human relationships being flattened into ‘friend’-nodes, the erasure of myth by constant visibility and exhausting availability.

what kind of network society do i want to support? a closed compound of willingly data-mined crayons or an open net of chance and unpredictability? more…

I am of the same mind, and had decided a couple months ago to do the same — at the end of February. I have found it most instructive that since I put this status up:

I’ve gotten all of four five responses in the last month and only one at the suggested email address — of around 500 ‘friends.’ It appears that the concept of ‘friend’ in the FaceBook space is quite completely divergent from that of my own conception of friend-ship. There is a bloated vacuity in the expressed presence that the applied protocol of FB requires as a condition of participation. I hate to pop your bubble.